Emulate and code on the Atari ST
OUR EXPERT
Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance creative technologist.
The ringing of the school bell in the 80s didn’t only signal break time – it also marked the start of a computing conflict. It started over which eight-bit computer was the best. Commodore kids battled Spectrum fans, Amstrad kids launched their surprise attack! But when the 16-bit machines came along, those battlelines were forever changed. Commodore had its Amiga range of computers and Atari had the ST, but both shared a common CPU – the Motorola 68000 – and a similar form factor. The Atari ST obviously didn’t have the custom chips found in the Amiga, but it did have a small headstart on the Amiga, due to a number of legal wrangles in the mid-1980s.
The Atari ST was announced Atari’s 520ST at Consumer Electronics Show in January 1985, initially being seen as a “typical Commodore 64 style corner-cutting product” but later that year at COMDEX Atari showed off a revision of the ST which would later go on sale for $800 for a model with a monochrome monitor. Colour took the price up to just under $1,000. For your money you got a 16-bit computer with an 8MHz CPU and 512KBs of RAM. The RAM could be upgraded to 4MB, at extra cost.
The Atari ST saw many revisions. A cost-reduced version, the STFM
